Philip Roth Quotes

Sometimes I feel like a has-been who never was.

Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.

My sister wanted to be an actress, but she never made it. She does live in a trailer. She got halfway. She's an actress, she just never gets called to the set.

My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

Last guys don't finish nice.

At the end of the day, I've played six years, haven't made the playoffs yet, that burns me and hurts my heart, so I really want to be playing.

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

It's a bad day when you don't get the work done that you need to get done or you don't get it done to the satisfaction.

I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.

The world has not promised anything to anybody

This man will never finish anything. He thinks about the end before he thinks about the beginning.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Over my career, I'd watched senior leader visits have unintended negative consequences. Typically, schedules were unrealistically overloaded and were modified during the visit to cancel parts of the plan.

I had given up on acting because I would go for auditions every day, but nothing would happen.

We ceased to be a band the moment we made it. It left us with nothing. We felt like a failure although we had commercial success.

You get so close, a lot of close calls, and then it just doesn't happen. That's just the way the industry is. It's very difficult.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.